"...a few months ago [Marc Cohodes] went to the Bloomberg crypto team with all the information he had about Silver Gate and FTX, and the fact that there was something very wrong here...[Marc said] you should ask Sam these questions."
"And you think about how perverse that is. I always assume journalists were out there trying to catch the bad guys, expose people and become famous themselves by doing that, but in reality, that’s not how it works at all."
- James Block
"I think that [journalists are] captured to a very large extent, just like the regulators have been captured by promises of big salaries...I don’t know...if things are ever going to change, but I think it’s a thing we see everywhere. And it’s not just...crypto."
"The parallels between FTX, and Tether, and BCCI are amazing." 💥
- James Block
The above mini-thread was from Grant Williams talking to James Block.
I can relate to Block's interest in financial history & fraud. I have no crypto (except a tiny $ of BTC) - I've neither made nor lost money on it. I just have a pretty good b.s. meter.
"On the surface, BCCI appeared to be a legitimate bank...BCCI also operated as a money launderer extraordinaire for all comers...the bank was used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to launder funds, finance illegal arms deals, and finance operations throughout the world"
The above and below passages are from @MikeBurgersburg's latest, "A forgotten banking scandal suggests FTX is the tip of the crypto iceberg"
"BCCI was from its earliest days made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries..."
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"This is either the greatest security breach of all time, or they tried to assassinate [Trump], or they left the door open so wide that that any infiltrator could come in."
- Erik Prince
"The fact that the Secret Service was bested by a 20-year-old, to literally draw blood from the Republican candidate for President, and former President, is inconceivably incompetent."
"It's a result of a culture of no accountability for failure."
I normally don't watch Carlson, but our government's massive attack on free speech this century via the "Censorship Industrial Complex" is an existential issue.
"...the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the national security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world."
"The State Department, the Defense department, the CIA are all expressly forbidden from operating on U.S. soil. Of course, this is so far from the case, it's not even funny."
Like most of you, I have the House Financial Services subcommittee hearing on climate-related financial risks and monetary policy on in the background right now.
There's something called the "Network for Greening the Financial System." Not sure what they do but pretty sure the main goal will be you will own nothing.
Brad Sherman making sense at this moment. What is going on?
"Sequoia Capital, the world’s most prominent venture-capital firm, got covered the $1 billion it had with the lender. Kanzhun, a Beijing-based tech company... received a backstop for more than $900 million."
@SecYellen @FDICgov Wow. Hat tip to John Titus for pointing out this dataset.
Incredible.
Post-Q3 2019, after the Fed restarted QE, the Share of Checkable Deposits & Currency Held by the TOP 0.1% jumped from 5% to 13.9%, while the 50th-90th % share fell from 36.2% to 26.6%! fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults/…
"Why aren’t we hearing about interest rate derivatives blowing up and taking down either a U.S. mega bank or its counterparty on the wrong side of the trade?"
"Adding to our curiosity as to how everybody landed on the correct side of the interest rate derivative trades during the fastest rate hikes in 40 years, is a chart in the most recent OCC derivatives report for the first quarter of this year...How is this possible?"
"Banks that have rigged everything from foreign exchange to Libor interest rates, to precious metals, to U.S. treasury securities have the full confidence of the OCC to accurately report their derivative exposures."
"The Fed Trader will say, “Hey, we want to purchase $8 billion worth of Treasury bills from you at this price.” And the bank says, “Okay, here you go.”...It pumps up asset prices."
"Ben Bernanke took so many huge risks and was so astoundingly wrong about so much. You just look at the debate about quantitative easing in 2012. Bernanke had his staff draw up a forecast of what was going to happen. All the numbers are in the book; it’s stunningly wrong."